


miles below the surface

by sashawire



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Child Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Electrocution, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 01, Vanya Hargreeves-centric, Whump, leonard peabody die painfully challenge, shock collar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28196214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashawire/pseuds/sashawire
Summary: …The power she exhibits thus far appears to be unlimited, uncontrollable, and dangerous. It is for the greater good that her abilities should remain a secret.Methods of limiting her power:The words“Mood altering medication”are crossed out. And below that, underlined twice—Electroconvulsive therapy.*In a world where Reginald Hargreeves cannot prescribe tranquilizers to his children, he finds another method of keeping Number Seven docile.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves/Leonard Peabody
Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065578
Comments: 2
Kudos: 80





	miles below the surface

**Author's Note:**

> **Content Warnings:** Child abuse (Reginald Hargreeves-typical), electrocution, dehumanisation (collaring), graphic depictions of a small child being electrocuted, PTSD, panic attacks, mental breakdowns, stalking, domestic manipulation and mental abuse (Harold Jenkins-typical).
> 
> Please heed the warnings guys, this gets pretty dark !

Number Seven scratches at her neck.

Within seconds, a bigger pair of hands catches her own, soft and smelling of vanilla. Mom coaxes her hands away from her neck, placing them firmly on the table with a gently chastising pat.

“Don’t do that, darling,” Mom says, red lips tucked into a smile. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

Seven watches her, fingers curling on the table with the effort of not scratching. The band around her neck is smooth and not overly chafing, but it’s tight. Like a shirt collar too small for her throat.

“Can I go play with the others, now?” She asks, swinging her legs and hopping off the chair.

Mom puts her hand on top of Seven’s head this time, stroking her hair. “Seven, sweetie,” she kneels down on one knee, “you’re not going to be training with them anymore. Your father has different plans—”

Seven opens her mouth to whine, scuffing her shoes against the floor as she prepares to throw a fit but—

_ Pain— _

_ It hurts— _

_ Mom, it hurts—! _

The white fades and she scrunches her eyes up, trying to clear the blobby tears, hiccoughs whistling in and out of her mouth. Mom folds Seven into her arms, shushing her with that same gentle exasperation.

Seven whimpers, and opens her mouth for a sob, only to be met with another white-blast from the thing around her neck. Another wave of tears bubbles up, and she keens silently into Mom’s chest.

*

Number Three looks up at Dad. She chews her tongue, wanting to ask about the metal collar, the red scratch marks around Number Seven’s throat, the puffiness of her eyes. Dad looks back down at her expectantly.

Instead, she does as she’s told;  _ “I heard a rumour…” _

She never asks, and Dad never says.

(Later on, this is something Vanya will resent her for. This is something Allison will resent herself for.)

*

_ Stomp. _ A chorus of “ew-w”s from Three and Six as Four rubs the sole of his shoe against the dirt, leaving the slimy residue of smushed ants behind.

Curiously, there is no input from Seven. Four glances to the side, where Seven sits in the shade, watching them, skinny arms around her knees.

Her lips press into a thin line. She tilts her head, and her hair pools across one shoulder, exposing the weird metal choker she’s started wearing around her neck. One hand comes up to scratch at it.

For the first time in Four’s memory, Seven doesn’t cry for the ants squashed on Four’s shoe.

*

Mom’s good at voices. On Saturday nights, as a special treat, all seven of them, plus Pogo hovering by the open door, pile onto Number One's bed for one big storytime. The voices she does for the story-book monsters are the best. Squeaky, or growly, or sing-song-y, or deep, or funniest of all, dry and old man-ish in a way that always ends up sounding like Dad.

That's what it is tonight. The monster in the pictures is all wrinkly, skin folded over itself and wispy grey hairs sticking straight out of its head. He even wears a  _ monocle, _ Four notes to Six with delight.

Mom does a posh, gravelly voice, saying a line that Two could’ve sworn has come straight from Dad's mouth.

They all giggle, including Seven, and Two jumps, not having realized she’s right behind him, cross-legged on the bed. He jumps again when she cuts herself off with this weird  _ “Ghk.” _ One, back against the headboard, frowns.

“Number Seven, you look sick.”

Mom places her hand on Seven's shoulder, rubbing little circles with her thumb. With a tiny jerk Seven goes really red, and then really, really white, and Two would tease her for looking like a chameleon except he’s too busy worrying she’s gonna hurl all over his pajamas.

She doesn’t, narrowly, and stays completely silent the rest of the night.

*

“Dismissed.” A clattering of buckle-shoes on the tiled floor and the squeaking of chairs back into place fills the dining room, every child scrambling to be the first in the washroom for the weekly bath. “Number Seven, hold on one moment.”

The words are not said any louder than any other firm command from Dad ever is, but Seven jolts as if stung either way. She lifts one hand to scratch at her band, but forces it down. “’Kay, Dad.”

Her siblings’ footsteps fade up the stairs. Seven scuffs her shoe against the tiles with a  _ kch. _ For a moment, Dad’s focus remains on dabbing at his face with his fancy handkerchief, ensuring not a speck can be seen in his voluptuous facial hair. Seven wonders if she’s misheard his order to stay behind.

Eventually, Dad places his handkerchief back in his pocket and looks her directly in the eyes in that way that always made her squirm.

“You may take your collar off before bathing. It will be put back on you immediately after.”

And that’s all. Dad pushes his chair out and leaves to find something other than his children to sit and study intensely for a while, Mom busies herself clearing the table, and Seven scampers up the stairs, heart light and sweet and fizzy as soda.

*

The band is the last thing Mom takes off before Number Seven steps into the bath. The second she’s in, Seven takes a deep breath. The biggest tantrum she’s ever thrown is building at the base of her throat.

She opens her mouth and—

Nothing comes out.

Mom hums one of the tunes from Dad’s old gramophone, scooping up bathwater to wet Seven’s hair with. Seven sits there, knees to her chest, pressure building and building in the space below her ribs and above her stomach.

It has nowhere to go. Seven hunches her shoulders, shivering at the empty space around her neck.

She doesn’t even whinge as Mom scrubs behind her ears with the raspy washcloth.

Mom clips the band back on as soon as Seven stepped out of the bath. It itches against her heated, bath-soft skin, but it’s familiar. She doesn’t mind.

*

“Mom says I can take my band off soon,”

Five grunts, glancing up at Seven—at Vanya Hargreeves. They’ve just turned thirteen years old, and Five has just turned down a new name. He’s perfectly fine with the name he already has.

He tears out a page of calculations. He’d messed up a conversion early on, so all the figures are off. “You don’t sound particularly excited,”

Vanya shrugs. “It’s whatever. I always feel… always feel weird, when I take it off to have a bath. Like my neck is too light, or something. You alright?”

When Five looks down, he’s crumpled the sheet of math in his hand into a small, dense ball. He drops it, and it bounces into a roll on his bedroom floor. “I think it's funny that Dad feels the need to  _ collar you,” _ he fights down the urge to bare his teeth. “Symbolic, huh?”

“It’s not really like that,” Vanya sighs, lifting a finger from her book to run along the ridge where the collar meets her neck. “It’s for my anxiety. I think it alerts Mom if I start panicking?”

Five riffles through his memories for a single time Mom needed to be called in to help with Vanya’s anxiety. If it’s ever happened, no one told him about it. “And Dad couldn’t give you a bracelet or something? He’s obviously sending a message.”

Vanya doesn’t seem to have a reply to that, so she bows her head back to her book, and Five clicks his pen and starts back on his calculations.

(In six days, Mom will unclip the band from Vanya’s neck for the final time. Two days before that, Five will be gone.)

(But for now, rain throbs against the window and Vanya’s violin curves snug into Five’s side, and Reginald Hargreeves’ prodigy and unfavourite sit together quietly.)

*

Vanya touches the bare skin on her neck. Where the band used to sit is raised and pink and shiny. (It’s a mark that will never truly disappear, but Vanya doesn’t know what yet.)

Fundamentally, nothing at all feels different.

*

After Vanya leaves the mansion, she applies for violinist positions, moves into a studio apartment, and makes zero friends.

She never wears chokers. They’re a little too flashy for her.

(Sometimes, when she steps out of the shower, skin scorched ruddy and mind cloudy with steam, she still reaches for a band that isn’t there.)

*

At the orchestra, the conductor makes some wisecrack about some long-dead composer, and everyone else at rehearsal titters, nudging each other. Vanya finds it funny, but for some reason, she doesn’t laugh.

She manually curls her face into a smile anyway, and shivers. It’s been years. Why can she still feel her old band pressing into her neck?

*

Harold Jenkins is no stranger to coating his hands in miscellaneous trash-juice. Specifically trash-juice of the Hargreeves kind.

He knows how much milk they drink a week, how long it takes them to finish a tube of toothpaste, how they prefer free-range eggs over factory, how many fan letters they throw out without even breaking the seal…

He’s come up with interesting things before. He knows that the curly haired one does hard stuff (liquor bottles and what look suspiciously like joint stubs), at least one of them stutters  _ (Self-Therapy for the Stutterer _ by Malcolm Fraser, notes scrawled in the margins and some pages bent just a little with frustration), and someone keeps buying magazines for teenage girls  _ (Answer these 8 questions and we’ll tell you what flavour chapstick YOU wear!!) _

But it’s been pretty boring since the last one left and it was just the big guy. And after he disappeared off the face of the Earth (his favourite generic-brand conditioner stopped appearing in the trash) it was only Reggie Hargs and whatever servants he must’ve had lying around.

And now he’s dead. The Umbrella Academy’s back in town—to collect their inheritance, presumably.

But Harold has something far more valuable than gold-plated curtain rods or whatever else the old scumbag could cough up from beyond the grave.

A journal.  _ Regional Hargreeves’ journal. _

With careful, quivering fingers, Harold flicks through, skimming, page by page.  _ Appreciably enhanced physical strength and resilience… Ability to hold breath indefinitely… extremely useful. Prevaricates with appalling ease… Development of psychic abilities stunted… Space-Time manipulation. Disappeared several days ago… Gruesome but fascinating… The power she exhibits— _

Harold stops.

He is aware a seventh Hargreeves brat exists. Half the planet is, after she aired out the entire family’s dirty laundry with her tell-all, stinking up bookstores for months. But as far as Harold knows, she doesn’t do much except play violin and look pouty on her book cover and whine about not being the centre of attention.

Why does she have her own notes?

Back flat against the alley wall, half crouched, Harold turns the page.

_ …The power she exhibits thus far appears to be unlimited, uncontrollable, and dangerous. It is for the greater good that her abilities should remain a secret. _

_ Methods of limiting her power: _

The words  _ “Mood altering medication” _ are crossed out. And below that, underlined twice—

_ Electroconvulsive therapy. _

*

She can’t even remember what it was Leonard  _ said. _ He’d said something, she remembers, something funny, and that smile had spread across his face the way it always does, with all the ease of butter on toast, but just that underside of fiddle-footed self-consciousness. The kind that makes her heart squirm, because she knows what that feeling is, she  _ lives _ inside that feeling, but  _ he _ shouldn’t have to know what it’s like because Leonard is  _ good _ and—

Anyway, he’d said something funny, and Vanya had laughed. Not really, even. Her breath had just hitched and she’d exhaled through her nose a little, smiling down into her cooled coffee. For a moment, everything was perfect and then—

She’d excused herself to the bathroom, and here she is.

Taking deep breaths into her sleeve, sitting on the closed toilet seat, staring at the Sharpie-defiled wall.

Between reading about hypothetical sexual relations with her hypothetical grandmother and wondering if that’s really how you spell “supersede”, Vanya asks herself why she can’t move. Why her brain tells her that if she so much as twitches from this position on a dirty public toilet, something terrible is going to happen.

Was it something Leonard said? No, she’d laughed at it, and besides, Leonard would never hurt her.

He’d joked, and she’d laughed, and then…

Oh.

Well. Trust Vanya Hargreeves to be so inept at positive emotion that she has to  _ hide in the bathroom _ after laughing for the first time in. In years.

Before ten minutes ago in the coffee shop, she can’t remember the last time she laughed. Almost thirty years old and she… Jesus. Vanya hunches a little further over her knees. She wonders if she should feel like crying. She doesn’t.

*

Leonard brings her to his grandmother’s cabin, and Vanya’s life falls apart very quickly after that.

*

The water is lukewarm and stained pink, and Vanya’s skin is so full of white noise that she can’t even relish the warm, strong, achingly tender hands cleaning Allison’s blood from her shoulders and chest.

Those hands brush a little too close to her neck, and she flinches, hating herself as Leonard/Harold murmurs a soft apology.

His fingers comb through her hair gently, and Vanya knows it’s because she will break like porcelain given half an opportunity. She’s just shown him that. He parts her hair in two, laying it over either shoulder, and his breath hitches against the back of her neck.

Vanya’s lips are sticky and her voice is a drowning bird in her throat, so she just gives a confused hum in place of a question.

“Nothing,” he reassures her, voice low, “sorry, just a knee cramp.” Vanya nods, and slumps to rest her forehead against her knees.

(Harold Jenkins does not tell her about the twin scars, white, branching, spindly, crawling up her neck from where her collar once sat. That’s ammo he plans to use later.)

(He will never get a chance to, for better or worse.)

*

Vanya lies, half-curled in the fetal position. The floor is surprisingly soft, foamy. She can hear her own breath roaring in her ears.

The wetness that leaks from her eyes and nose drips onto her collar, her sleeves, the floor, her hair. It’s completely silent. Vanya hasn’t sobbed once since she’d held Allison, warm and spasming, in her arms.

(The blood still isn’t fully out from underneath her nails.)

Her reflection croons to her from the door window. Wide, dark eyes and a cherubic face, seething of revenge and power and graphic disembowelment, and Vanya listens, but does not engage.

Reflection-Number Seven spits, “Oh, so you’re ignoring me, too? Fine then,” and then Vanya blinks, and there’s someone else in the cell with her.

Except not really, because it’s  _ her. _ It’s Number Seven from the window, but even younger. No bigger than five years old. She huddles in the corner, little knuckles blanched where they’re clenched in the fabric of her skirt, little face splotchy red and white, tear tracks sliding down the chubby curve of her cheeks.

Something’s wrong. Vanya Hargreeves is not a family woman by any means, and she usually works with older children, but even she knows that a small crying child is supposed to be loud. She’s seen them in supermarkets and restaurants, squalling and wriggling around in their prams or their exhausted parents’ arms.

Number Seven wipes at her tears with the back of her hand, rocking back and forth, completely and utterly silent. She cries helplessly, and even with the opening and closing of her mouth and the heaving of her breath, she is soundless.

Vanya half-sits up, leaning on one elbow, just in time to hear, the weakest, wettest of hiccoughing sobs squeak past Number Seven’s lips. And then—

Oh  _ God— _

This horrible wheezing sound wrenches itself out of baby-her. Almost a scream, if someone had grabbed her around the throat a moment beforehand. Her little legs, clad in shoes almost too tiny to be believed, convulse against the foamy floor. Her hands fall away from her face, and she sits there, twitching, still crying. She does not make another sound.

Vanya’s vision blurs then, and when she blinks it away, Number Seven is gone.

_ No, _ she lifts a hand to brush against the centre of her chest.  _ No, actually, she isn’t. _

“What did they—” Vanya stops to clear the thickness in her throat. “What did they do to us?”

“You remember,” The Number Seven in the door’s reflection whispers, “You remember the collar. The mind forgets, the body remembers.”

Vanya lies back onto her side, cheek pressed to the floor, back facing reflection-Number Seven.

“They took away your laughter, your tears, your anger,”

She hasn’t brushed her hair in days. It falls around her neck and shoulders, choppy, uneven. Dad would hate it. She can still feel Harold’s fingers brushing through it.

“We were too young to even  _ understand, _ but can you recall the pain? Do you remember that little girl, sobbing in her mother’s arms, thinking her a protector instead of a perpetrator?”

Vanya brings the back of one hand to press against her mouth. The other scratches at the raised scar on her neck. The tension that sits, swollen, inside her is still there. She’s just used to it.

“You want to forget the collar, but it’s still there. Can’t you feel it around your throat?”

“I can feel it. I remember.”

Her teeth are wet where she grins against her hand.

Vanya Hargreeves rolls onto her front, lifts herself onto her elbows, and sobs through her smile, hoarse and reedy. Her nails break as she claws them against the ground.

Her hair falls into her face. The pressure below her ribs builds—

Builds—

And then—

Release.

Laughter. Sobbing. Dry heaving.

Her shoulders don’t stop lurching. Her nails leave lines in the floor below her.

She alternates until her face is covered in mucus and tears and what might be saliva, blood flaking in the lines of her hands, sweat pooling on either side of her spine and gathering at her collar.

Her various bodily fluids are growing tacky against her skin as she turns to Number Seven, who watches her hungrily. Vanya coughs, croaks;

“Tell me what I need to do,”

Number Seven cannot smile, but beneath the forced neutrality of the face they’re set in, her eyes gleam. She flattens her ghostly palm against the chest of her uniform.

“We always loved stories where the answer was inside us all along, didn’t we?”

**Author's Note:**

> Five & Allison after finding out what the collar around Vanya's neck was really for: Alright gang, grab your baseball bats, we're beating up a dead old man tonight !!
> 
> If i had the energy to acknowledge season 2 i probably could've put a bit in about vanya getting electrocuted AGAIN and def not reacting well but, y'know.
> 
> tumblr: @chickpeace


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